Useful spares

Ann left for Felixstowe after breakfast and Clare went off to school for her weekly kindergarten eurythmy session. As I was leaving for church, Mary came across and said that BT was refusing to let her access her email, posting a warning message about using an 'insecure browser'. I couldn't do anything about it at that moment and promised to return and sort it out after lunch. She's still using Kath's elderly Acer Aspire, which reached the end of its useful life with Windows over five years ago. I got it running nicely with Linux Mint, and gave the machine to Mary, and it's given her little trouble ever since. Interesting ... what's happened?

Following our trip to Caldey on Tuesday, I was glad of the opportunity to go and celebrate the memory of St Benedict at the St John's midweek Eucharist. It's amazing to think that St Samson, the first Abbot of Caldey's Celtic religious community was a contemporary of Benedict. So too was St Illtud, Samson's spiritual father and teacher in the monastic settlement at Llantwit Major. The movement of the Spirit that inspired the 'flight into the desert' of God seeking individuals dropping out of society, uncomfortable with the rise of Christianity as an established religion under the Emperor Constantine, began a century earlier with St Anthony of Egypt, St Basil the Great and the Cappadocian Fathers. 

Latin and Celtic monasticism also evolved at this time and communities organised themselves, in their own distinctive way and flourished wherever they were able to plant themselves, whatever the challenges and difficulties this entailed. Were they each aware of the other's existence, I wonder? The 5th-6th century monastic pioneers probably knew of their fourth century predecessors and their teaching, but not necessarily about their contemporaries. Where monks settled, lived, worked and prayed, they attracted neighbours, and benefited from each others skills, experience and labour, and as a result social and economic development occurred. 

There wasn't a grand social networking plan or a mission strategy as such. Everything evolved around a life of worship that was accompanied by hard work of one kind or another. Thus the Benedictine way of life spread across Europe, to ever more remote regions, bringing know-how, technologies, education, and transformation of the very landscape itself. European civilisation, and even British religious culture owes much to the movement Benedict's rule inspired. He's a suitable patron saint for the continent as a whole. 

After the service I visited the wound clinic to collect a supply of dressings and returned home to cook lunch, then went and inspected the problematic laptop. I quickly found it couldn't complete its update cycle - 'Repositories not found ...' was the error message. Well, surprise surprise! The Linux version installed has run for five years, and hadn't updated some of its components: i.e. to the new Firefox browser version. The older the version, and eventually some secure sites will refuse to make use of it because it's been labelled 'insecure'. If the repository links weren't functional then the best answer would be a re-installation of a recent Linux Mint version, destined to be update supported for another five years. So that's what I did. Well, did twice actually, as I removed the installation medium to soon at reboot and borked the process. Still, by the time I left, the machine was running normally again, probably better in fact than recently. Eventually the hard drive will go. I have a few spares I can used. If anything else dies, the machine goes for scrap. I have several spare machines, as people given them to me, when they upgrade. You never know when they'll come in useful.